Horse Racing (Compute!)

Published in COMPUTE! 1984/10 (Issue #53). Watch your favorite pony win (or lose) in this detailed, effective simulation of race-track betting.

"Horse Racing" is a multiplayer game in which you must wager on horses. Up to nine players may play the game, and each starts the game with $500. There are five races. The player with the greatest amount of money after the fifth race is the winner. To make the simulation more accurate, the program recalculates the odds at the beginning of each race. That means that the favorite will always pay lower odds. And you will always know these new odds because they are posted just before the race begins.

Some of the most exciting horse races occur when the track conditions vary. The reason for this is that long shots often have a better chance

of winning on slippery tracks because the track could cause some of the better horses to fall or not get a good footing for speed. Horse Racing

varies the track conditions from race to race and gives a slight advantage to one horse for each particular track condition. This advantage is

taken into account when the initial odds are calculated, making a horse the favorite very often, but not always.